Algeria's Minister of Post and Telecommunications Sid-Ali Zerrouki and Niger's Minister of Communication and New Information Technologies Hamani Kargné jointly presided over the official launch of commercial operation of a new trans-Saharan fiber-optic link at Assamaka, on the Algeria-Niger border, on 6 October 2026. The ceremony was reported by Algerie Eco, Horizons, El Moudjahid, Radio Algérie and Niger's state news agency ANP, and was attended by Algeria's ambassador to Niger, the governor of Agadez and other officials from both countries.
The segment connects In-Guezzam in Algeria to the Arlit-Agadez axis in Niger and offers an initial 100 Gbps of capacity, with built-in modular expansion capability to scale up as regional demand grows, according to the outlets' reporting.
The link was built jointly by technical teams from Algérie Télécom and Niger Télécom under bilateral agreements signed in Niamey on 8 September 2025, when Algérie Télécom committed to donate transmission equipment for the connection, Telecompaper and Ecofin Agency reported at the time. A second accord covered staff training, and a related agreement established a skills center with Niger's higher school of electronic communications, ESCEP-Niger. The October 2026 ceremony marks the formal commissioning of that build-out rather than a first announcement: by early 2026 the Nigerien side of the project was reported as roughly 97% complete, with the fiber infrastructure in Niger having already received provisional acceptance in November 2025.
At the ceremony, Zerrouki said the choice of Assamaka, near In-Guezzam, carried symbolic weight because the project sits within the Comité de liaison, a coordinating body for the six-country Trans-Saharan Backbone project that also includes Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Chad. ANP quoted an Algerian official describing the link as the first effectively operational cross-border interconnection within that wider backbone project. That characterization rests on a single attributed source and has not been independently corroborated elsewhere in available reporting.
The segment adds to a Niger Télécom-run national fiber network of more than 1,000 kilometers, built since 2016 with roughly 43 million euros in donor financing, which is intended to eventually reach Algeria, Nigeria, Chad, Benin and Burkina Faso.
No source reviewed specifies retail or wholesale pricing, how capacity will be shared among Nigerien operators, or which government bears ongoing maintenance costs.
Ecofin Agency framed the new route as a resilience hedge, pointing to neighboring Chad, which has repeatedly lost international connectivity when its sole fiber link through Cameroon's Camtel network was disrupted — including a three-hour outage in August 2024 caused by a double fiber cut, compounding an existing outage on Chad's separate Sudan link that had been down since May 2024 due to conflict there. Chad suffered additional, longer blackouts from Cameroon-linked cable breaks in October 2024, prompting Chadian officials to seek a faster connection to the trans-Saharan network via Niger. Actual traffic volumes and measurable resilience gains from the new Niger-Algeria link have not yet been independently verified post-launch.
The launch lands amid Niger's post-coup reorientation of external partnerships toward Algeria and the Alliance of Sahel States following its January 2025 exit from ECOWAS, even as the two governments have had recent friction, including a 2025 ambassador-withdrawal episode over a downed drone near the Malian border.